Project Management Experiences

I have had a wide variety of roles and responsibilities throughout my career in IT. This section amplifies my Project Management experiences.

Project Manager for IBM Services at Fireman's Fund Insurance Company, Novato, CA
(Jan 2007 – May 2007)

This project was a software conversion project involving all of Firemans Fund's production JCL. During that time I became proficient with IBM’s Project Management Methodology and created the following documents: My duties included coordinating resources in a matrix environment and ensuring collaboration between geographically dispersed (on-site, off-site, and off-shore) and organizationally dispersed (Firemans Fund and various IBM groups) resources.

This was quite a challenging project because of the very nature of what we were doing. There was (understandable) institutional resistance to change, the source code and documentation for key software was missing or incomplete, and FFIC had only recently outsourced IT to IBM replacing an earlier outsourcing partner. From a technical p.o.v. I had to read Assembler code to infer functionality, come up to speed with the functional differences between Tivoli and ESP, and QA the output from off-shore resources. All that helped make it a fun and interesting project.

Project Manager for SSA Global at Memphis City Schools, Memphis, TN
(Dec 2006 – Feb 2007)

This project was to implement a web based front-end to their Procurement system. My responsibilities included:

Technical Lead for SSA Global at RHB Bank, Malaysia
(Mar 2004 – Jan 2005)

I was Technical Lead for a software migration project at RHB Bank in Malaysia. We were upgrading the bank’s Accounts Payable, Purchase Order, General Ledger, and Asset Management systems to the current release, including all changes and customizations. My PM responsibilities included:

Software Development Manager for Walker Interactive, San Francisco, CA
(July 1989 – April 1999)

As a Software Development Manager for Walker, an ERP vendor, I was responsible for all stages of the software development life cycle, including: project management; requirements definition; business analysis; design and construction; testing; training; on-going maintenance and support.

Project Management was a natural aspect to my role as Development Manager. My PM responsibilities included: Creating project plans; Securing agreement from stakeholders; Staffing the projects; Tracking progress against the plan; Reporting progress to upper management and other stakeholders; Coordinating product release with other groups like Sales & Marketing and Customer Support; Ensuring product quality; Managing the beta test process at customer sites; Managing the turnover to production.

I was responsible for bringing the following products to market:

The following are some of the customers that were early adopters for the aforementioned products – that is, they helped with the requirements definition, design review, and beta test.